swissmiss is a design blog and studio run by Tina Roth Eisenberg, a 'swiss designer gone NYC'.

Chase Jarvis on Workflow

Photographer/Director Chase Jarvis shares his workflow and backup for every image he shoots, stills and video alike. This in-depth look includes all the steps from capture to archive and gives you a method to ensure that you’ll never lose a single image.

Your workflow is above average on the “budget”. IT still has some flaws.

Some positives
Using RAID drives to protect your data.

Some incorrect assumptions
1. You assume your data will fit into 2TB for off-site
2. Time machine isn’t measurable and monitor-able. IT requires a human to check to make sure the data is secure.
3. The removed hard drive will work when you bring it back in a disaster! (big assumption)
4. The data when you separate the RAID 1 drives is safe, but the next day when you and your co-worker get back together it is just as much at risk as when the RAID 1 drives were there
5. You assume people will actually name files properly.

Good first step.. IT can be improved though.

Suggestions.
1. Dont’ use time machine. Use a real backup software for your server.
2. Upgrade to online or tape storage for your backup system for the server. Hard drives are unreliable.

I’m no IT nerd, but there seem to be flaws in their system. From my experience witnessing large-scale server redundancy, there is less movement of physical hard drives. The transport of equipment seems inherently riskier than leaving it in the closet, meteor shower and all.

I personally use a combination of six external hard-drives, scheduled Super Duper backup, Time Machine, and a Cloud to backup files. Then again, I’m just one designer.

I think there is too much criticism of the offsite copy of data. Keep in mind the off-site copies are for DRP – they are the secondary copies, not the primary files.
Use of Time Machine is for non-critical data, as pointed out in the video. It is an acceptable compromise given the specified objective use.

Yes, the IT solution could be a little cleaner on the back-end, but I see it as an acceptable compromise.

Also keep in mind the overall workflow appears to incorporate very few individuals, relative to the volume of data. It’s also assumed these individuals remain constant for long periods of time, unlike staffs for a large IT corp. Change Mgmt should not be an issue, and if there is a brain fart, it can easily be addressed.

Ultimately so long as you have a copy of the original RAW data, everything can be re-created afterwards. How much effort that will take is a measure of compromises one is willing to make on the cost of the IT solution.

What I like is the use of Aperture as a front end to PS. I use Aperture 3 and I would liked to have seen more detail in the workflow regarding the actual editing.